Category Archives: Mobile

It’s a pretty new phenomenon in Indonesia. I have two paid sim cards from Telkomsel and XL. For both I pay a monthly subscription fee and obviously I pay for the usage. So far no problem. However, both Telkomsel and XL decided to monetize their paying customers just a tad bit more. When you now access the Internet using 3G changes are you will get to see a Pop ad which is basically a complete page take over. Something similar as in this screenshot.

Annoying to say the least. Also pretty much illegal in most of the rest of the world. And for good reasons I think. Why? Well, first of all, I pay for this service.

It’s not like I use a website like Tokobagus for free and Tokobagus in return shows me some ads to pay for the bills. No, I actually pay for this service and at the time when I subscribed their service did not include any pop ads. Next, I never did an opt-in for this service, which in my understanding is required by law. But even when not required by law, it would be the proper netiquette. Right? Also, as far as I know and can remember I never got any instructions on how to opt-out.

Android has become a serious candidate for dominance in the world-wide booming mobile Internet market. So any web developer that takes his/hers job serious should develop their (mobile) site taking into account mobile users and devices. Because there’s already a staggering amount of Android devices and software versions it’s impossible to buy all Android devices. Luckily Google comes to the rescue with an Android Device Emulator which is part of the Android SDK. With this emulator you will be able to test your site on literally ANY Android device imaginable, including non-existing. For Sangat Pedas a nice occasion to put both the Android Device Emulator and this site to the test.

Already Indonesia is a country where mobile Internet relatively to the total Internet users is the highest in South East Asia and one of the highest in the world. But still the total Internet penetration of just 21% in Indonesia is the lowest in SEA. According to Nielsen’s upcoming Southeast Asia Digital Consumer Report already 48% of all Internet users in Indonesia use a mobile phone to access the Internet. Considering that Indonesia is an archipelago which comprises around 18.000 islands this is not really surprising for obvious reasons.

But there are more strong signs that in the next years mobile Internet will surge like nowhere else in the world.Continue Reading →

Canadian researchers have developed a prototype of a flexible smartphone made of electronic paper. To activate a function or feature de user simply bends the phone in a certain way.

According to its creators the Paperphone will revolutionize the world of interactive computing. ‘Fingering’ your thin iPad 2 all of a sudden has become so 1.0 oldskool passe, paper is the new style. Our tree hugging readers don’t have to worry that the remaining forests will be cut down for the production of this device because the term paper is just a reference to the look-n-feel.

Though it’s not able to make photo’s, the most sensational game it offers is chess, and the look of it’s E-ink screen reminds us of the ancient hercules driven phosphor screens (retro is bleeping cool anyway), it should be able to do just about anything the iPhone can do, send emails, listen to music and of course calling.

Personally I think I’m a pretty tech savvy guy, I run a successful Internet company, use iPhone and MacBook and I manage to have actual conversations with the geeks in our office without them shaking their heads. Besides that I run a blog and did a lot of the “development” myself (ok, installing plugins isn’t rocket science but I did a lot of the CSS myself) and I test just about every website that comes along in the Indonesian startup scene.

However, today I had an SMS conversation with Selina (the only CEO that manages to get me to stutter) and in one message she said “Whatsapp?”. So first I thought she was merely asking “wassup?” in Indo-english but I guess she quickly noticed my ignorance and explained about Whatsapp, thanks for that Selina!

Recently I wrote a post claiming that according to the statistics hyper activity on Twitter gets you much more followers and I announced a field experiment to put this claim to the test and so I did. I added some external feeds to Google feedburner and used the publicize feature to automatically tweet about posts from sites like Techcrunch, Engadget and some others.

I started this experiment on my own twitter account on December 17th when I had 210 followers and now it’s three weeks later and my follower base grew over 50% to a staggering 306 followers. Nice result but I annoyed the hell out of some of my more appreciated followers and a rough estimate says that more than half of my new followers are spammers or companies I’m really not interested in.

So my conclusion, auto feeds on Twitter definitely will improve the quantity of followers but has the opposite effect on the quality.

In 2011 Motorola will be launching their Android tablet and they’re already starting some pre-launch promotion. For that they’ve made a somewhat funny video about the history and evolution of the tablet. Funny thing is that there are a lot of negative comments on this video on youtube like that it’s not good marketing practice to bash other products/manufacturers. Actually in general I agree that promoting your own product by bashing the competitors is bad practice but on the other hand it is funny to claim that this device will make the iPad and Galaxy Tab look ancient.

Angry birds has become my main source of entertainment in airports, the waiting room at the dentist and during boring meetings (sound of). And even though the birds are angry and on a rampage, who would have thought all the fluffy birds are in fact spying on you and me?

A research reported by the Daily Mail tested 101 apps and found that 56 transmitted the phone’s individual number (UDID) to a private company, some 47 sent the phone’s location and five sent age, gender and other personal information.

Among the 56 apps sending the phone’s UDID is Angry Birds which sent the information to the game’s makers Electronic Arts. Pandora, the popular music app, sent gender, location age and the phone ID to a string of advertising networks. Android and iPhone versions of a game called Paper Toss, where players try to throw paper wads into a bin, each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies.

Users with more than 100 friends have increased by three-fold to 21% since 2009.

• 22.5% of users accounted for about 90% of all tweets.
• 80% users have made fewer than 500 tweets.
• Justin Bieber is one of top two-word phrases and top
name in user’s bios.
• Significantly more users are disclosing their location, bio
and web information in Twitter profiles.

So it has been a good year for Twitter in which they probably doubled their number of members. What got my attention in the publication was this graph: